Employment outcomes continued to show almost no improvement in most developing countries over the second quarter of 2013 as gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates stagnated.
... See More + Employment growth took a modest hit, dropping to 0.9 percent, while the unemployment rate barely moved. Real wage growth was the only outcome showing improvement, but the 3.2 percent growth rate found in the second quarter of 2013 was practically half of the rate for 2012 (figure 1). In this same period, decreases in employment growth were more pronounced in East Asia and Latin America, where employment growth was halved. Real wage growth also dropped by half in these regions, while in East Europe and Central Asia, real wage growth stumbled to 2.9 percent. Overall, the slowdown in economic growth and in employment that started in the second half of 2012 continued unabated through the second quarter of 2013, driven by weak GDP growth and uncertainties regarding the pace of recovery in the developed world.
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Employment outcomes in developing countries did not show improvements in the first quarter of 2013. Although there was a small acceleration in the median growth rate of wages, in sharp contrast to the dynamics observed during the first half of 2012, employment growth slowed down and the unemployment rate increased slightly.
... See More + Most of the slowdown in employment growth took place in Asia and, particularly, in Latin America. Even in countries where employment continued to expand-Brazil, Turkey, and Romania-either the unemployment rate increased or wages fell. Regionally, East Asia drives the aggregate trend in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and continues to show relatively strong economic performance. On average, its GDP growth increased from 5.3 to 6.7 percent between the first quarters of 2012 and 2013, respectively. In the Latin America and Caribbean region, macroeconomic and labor market indicators weakened and showed slower growth in the first quarter of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012. Finally, the labor market in South Africa, the only Sub-Saharan African country included in the analysis, remains in a dire situation. Overall, unemployment remained at 25.2 percent, and real wage growth further contracted from 1 to 0.5 percent.
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This brief summarizes the together we will: evidence from a field experiment on female voter turnout in Pakistan. The information campaign occurred 2 weeks before the election.
... See More + In many emerging democracies women are less likely to vote than men and, when they do vote, are more likely to follow the wishes of household males. We assess the impact of a voter awareness campaign on female turnout and candidate choice. Geographic clusters within villages were randomly assigned to treatment or control, and within treated clusters, some households were left untreated. Compared to women in control clusters, both treated and untreated women in treated clusters are 12 percentage points more likely to vote, and are also more likely to exercise independence in candidate choice, indicating large spillovers. Data from polling stations suggests that treating 10 women increased turnout by about 9 votes, resulting in a cost per vote of US$ 2.3. Finally, a 10 percent increase in the share of treated women at the polling station led to a 6 percent decrease in the share of votes of the winning party.
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This brief summarizes does a picture paint a thousand words? Evidence from a microcredit marketing experiment in Pakistan for February-May 2007.
... See More + This paper analyzes a marketing experiment designed to encourage women to adopt a new microcredit product. A brochure with the same content but two different covers was randomly distributed among male and female borrowing groups. One cover featured five businesses run by men, while the other showed identical businesses run by women. Men and women responded to psychological cues. Among men who were not business owners, had lower measured ability and whose wives were less educated, the responses to the female brochure were more negative, as did female business owners with low autonomy within the household. Women with relatively high levels of autonomy had a similar negative response to the male brochure, while there was no effect on female business owners with autonomy. Overall, these results suggest that women's response to psychological cues, such as positive role models, may be affected by their level of autonomy at home, and more intensive interventions may be required for more disadvantaged women.
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Employment outcomes in developing countries began showing signs of strain in the second half of 2012, after a year of gradual progress. Figure 1 shows median growth rates for output, employment, and real wages as well as the median unemployment rate for 20 middle-income countries.
... See More + Gross domestic product (GDP) growth continued its slow decline in the wake of the weak recovery in Europe and the United States and continued financial uncertainty in parts of the European Union. After a long lag, the impact of this slowing growth is finally being felt in developing countries labor markets. In the fourth quarter of 2012, the median unemployment rate barely budged, falling from 5.9 to 5.8 percent. The fall in employment growth was more substantial, from 2.2 percent in the second quarter of 2012 to 1.7 in the third quarter and to 1.0 in the fourth. Median real wage growth also declined, falling to a modest 3.3 percent, much lower than the peak rate of 4.9 percent. In general, labor markets in developing countries made little progress in creating jobs and reducing unemployment in the second half of 2012.
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This new research report analyzes community development and decentralization projects, shows that such projects often fail to be sensitive to complex contexts, including social, political, historical and geographical realities, and fall short in terms of monitoring and evaluation systems, which hampers learning.
... See More + Citing numerous examples, including projects and programs supported by the World Bank, the authors demonstrate that participatory projects are not a substitute for weak states, but instead require strong central support to be effective. Promoting participation through community development projects and local decentralization has become a central tenet of development policy. The World Bank alone has invested about $85 billion over the last decade on development assistance for participation. However, some observers feel that policy making in the area is conceptually weak, that project design is informed more by slogans than careful analysis. There have also been questions about whether participatory development is effective in reducing poverty, improving service delivery, and building the capacity for collective action. Some observers also find that participatory projects are complex to implement and deeply affected by context, and are thus unsuited for large development institutions such as the World Bank. This groundbreaking report carefully examines each of these concerns. It outlines a conceptual framework for participation that is centered on the concept of civil society failure and how it interacts with market and government failures. The authors use this framework to understand the key policy debates surrounding participatory development and to frame the key policy questions. The report conducts the most comprehensive review of the evidence on the impact of participatory projects to date, looking at more than 400 papers and books. The report argues that participatory development is most effective when it works within a 'sandwich' formed by support from an effective central state and bottom-up civic action. This report represents an important contribution. It has significant implications for how to improve participation in development interventions and for development policy more broadly.
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This Inequality in Focus newsletter includes the following headings: Community-driven development, participation, and inequality: what does the evidence say?
... See More + ; Enhancing the redistributive role of fiscal policy in developing economies.
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This Inequality in Focus newsletter includes the following headings: Community-driven development, participation, and inequality: what does the evidence say?
... See More + ; Enhancing the redistributive role of fiscal policy in developing economies.
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This Inequality in Focus newsletter includes the following headings: Community-driven development, participation, and inequality: what does the evidence say?
... See More + ; Enhancing the redistributive role of fiscal policy in developing economies.
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The World Bank has allocated close to $80 billion towards participatory development projects over the last decade. A comprehensive review of the evidence on the efficacy of the approach conducted by the authors for the forthcoming Policy Research Report, Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?
... See More + , finds that while participatory projects have been reasonably effective in improving access to basic services, there is far less evidence of their effectiveness in improving household income or in building sustainable participatory institutions at the local level. A key issue is that the institutional culture in development agencies such as the World Bank lacks the flexibility and long-term commitment necessary for effective externally induced participatory development. Induced participation -- driven by large-scale bureaucratically managed processes, is quite different from more organic types of participation endogenously organized by civic groups. It requires a very different approach to development, one that pays close attention to contextual variation and to uncertain trajectories of change. In order to be effective, induced participatory projects need a strong focus on learning-by-doing; on monitoring and evaluation and a willingness to learn from failure. A review of the World Bank's practices in monitoring and evaluation, and of its incentives to learn from failure, reveals that without significant changes, including changes in the incentive structures facing management, the Bank cannot be effective in inducing participation.
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Female entrepreneurship is low in many developing economies partly because of constraints on women's time and mobility, which are often reinforced by social norms.
... See More + This paper analyzes a marketing experiment designed to encourage women to adopt a new microcredit product. A brochure with the same content but two different covers was randomly distributed among male and female borrowing groups. One cover featured five businesses run by men, while the other showed identical businesses run by women. Men and women responded to psychological cues. Among men who were not business owners, had lower measured ability and whose wives were less educated, the responses to the female brochure were more negative, as did female business owners with low autonomy within the household. Women with relatively high levels of autonomy had a similar negative response to the male brochure, while there was no effect on female business owners with autonomy. Overall, these results suggest that women's response to psychological cues, such as positive role models, may be affected by their level of autonomy at home, and more intensive interventions may be required for more disadvantaged women.
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This paper is organized in following headings: what constrains Africa's exports?; does the internet reduce corruption? evidence from United States and across countries; do labor statistics depend on how and to whom the questions are asked?
... See More + results from a survey experiment in Tanzania; entrepreneurship and development: the role of information asymmetries; getting credit to high return micro entrepreneurs: the results of an information intervention; impact of the business environment on young firm financing; does a picture paint a thousand words? evidence from a microcredit marketing experiment; and entrepreneurship and the extensive margin in export growth: a microeconomic accounting of Costa Rica's export growth during 1997-2007.
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Female entrepreneurship is low in many developing economies partly due to constraints on women's time and mobility, often reinforced by social norms.
... See More + The authors analyze a marketing experiment designed to encourage female uptake of a new microcredit product. A brochure with two different covers was randomly distributed among male and female borrowing groups. One cover featured 5 businesses run by men while the other had identical businesses run by women. The authors find that both men and women respond to psychological cues. Men who are not themselves business owners, have lower measured ability and whose wives are less educated respond more negatively to the female brochure, as do women business owners with low autonomy within the household. Women with relatively high levels of autonomy shown the male brochure have a similar negative response, while there is no effect on female business owners with autonomy shown the female brochure. Overall, these results suggest that women's response to psychological cues, such as positive role models, may be mediated by their autonomy and that more disadvantaged women may require more intensive interventions.
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Can communal heterogeneity explain persistent educational inequities in developing countries? The paper uses a novel data-set from rural Pakistan that explicitly recognizes the geographic structure of villages and the social makeup of constituent hamlets to show that demand for schooling is sensitive to the allocation of schools across ethnically fragmented communities.
... See More + The analysis focuses on two types of social barriers: stigma based on caste affiliation and female seclusion that is more rigidly enforced outside a girl's own hamlet. Results indicate a substantial decrease in primary school enrollment rates for girls who have to cross hamlet boundaries to attend, irrespective of school distance, an effect not present for boys. However, low-caste children, both boys and girls, are deterred from enrolling when the most convenient school is in a hamlet dominated by high-caste households. In particular, low-caste girls, the most educationally disadvantaged group, benefit from improved school access only when the school is also caste-concordant. A policy experiment indicates that providing schools in low-caste dominant hamlets would increase overall enrollment by almost twice as much as a policy of placing a school in every unserved hamlet, and would do so at one-sixth of the cost.
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In a setting where husbands wield considerable coercive power, forms of marriage should adapt to protect the interests of women and their families.
... See More + The authors study the pervasive marriage custom of watta satta in rural Pakistan, a bride exchange between families coupled with a mutual threat of retaliation. They show that watta satta may be a mechanism to coordinate the actions of two sets of in-laws, each of whom wish to restrain their sons-in-law but who only have the ability to restrain their sons. The authors' empirical results support this view. The likelihood of marital inefficiency, as measured by estrangement, domestic abuse, and wife's mental health, is significantly lower in watta satta arrangements as compared with conventional marriages, but only after properly accounting for selection.
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Although sharecropping has long fascinated economists, the determinants of this contractual form are still poorly understood and the debate over the extent of moral hazard is far from settled.
... See More + The authors address both issues by emphasizing the role of landlord supervision. When tenant effort is observable, but at a cost to the landlord, otherwise identical share-tenants can receive different levels of supervision and have different productivity. Unique data on monitoring frequency collected from sharetenants in rural Pakistan confirm that, controlling for selection, "supervised" tenants are significantly more productive than "unsupervised" ones. Landlords' decisions regarding the intensity of supervision and the type of incentive contract to offer depend importantly on the cost of supervising tenants.
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Temporary economic migration is undertaken largely in response to resource constraints. This is evident in the volume of remittances sent back by migrants to their families of origin.
... See More + In agricultural settings, where those left behind are likely to face considerable exposure to uninsured income risk, such resource flows should translate into better risk bearing capacity. In this paper the author takes up this question by asking whether economic migration allows households to avoid costly risk coping strategies. She focuses on early child growth since there is considerable epidemiological evidence that very young children are particularly vulnerable to shocks that lead to growth faltering, with substantial long-term health consequences. The data come from rural Pakistan, where, as in the rest of Asia, son preference is substantial and there are large gender gaps in most developmental outcomes. As such, the interest is in examining also whether migration-induced resource flows allow households to extend better nutrition and health care protection to girls. Recent work on the intra-household allocation of resources and risk has also shown that gender differences in the relative burden of risk may be important and that the allocation of resources to daughters is often one margin along which poor households adjust to uninsurable transitory income shocks. After accounting for selection into migration, the results indicate that migration has a substantially larger positive impact on growth outcomes for young girls. And the growth advantage is sustained among older girls, suggesting potential intergenerational benefits of averting nutritional and other health shocks for girls in early childhood. These results are further validated by restricting the sample to migrant households and comparing the growth outcomes of siblings before and after migration.
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Inequalities in access to education pose a significant barrier to development. It has been argued that this reflects, in part, borrowing constraints that inhibit private investment in human capital by the poor.
... See More + One promise of the recent proposals to open international labor markets to allow for the temporary economic migration of low-skilled workers from developing to industrial countries is its potential impact on human capital accumulation by the poor. The large remittance flows from migrants to their communities of origin underscores this aspect of migration. However, migration can also transform expectations of future employment and induce changes in household structure that can exert an independent effect on the private returns to investment in human capital. The author explores the relationship between temporary economic migration and investment in child schooling. A key challenge is to deal appropriately with selection into migration. She finds that the potential positive effects of temporary economic migration on human capital accumulation are large. Moreover, the gains are much greater for girls, yielding a very substantial reduction in gender inequalities in access to education. Significantly, though, the gains appear to arise almost entirely from the greater resource flows to migrant households. The author cannot detect any effect of future migration prospects on schooling decisions. More significantly, she does not find any protective effect of migration-induced female headship on schooling outcomes for girls. Rather, female headship appears to protect boys at the cost of girls.
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